5B Activities for the Week of April 27th, 2015

Hello Parents and Students!

Here are the reminders for this week: 

1.  The second part of PARCC testing will occur this week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday only.  Testing will take place in the morning.  There will be one ELA test and two Math tests.

2.  We will be having another Marble Jar Celebration this Friday!  We still need to decide what we'll be doing, so stay tuned!  :-)

3.  Please return the field trip forms for both the WVHS Planetarium field trip and the Hill MS field trip.  Thank you!

Here's what's going on in the curricular areas this week: 

Word Study:  This week we will be working on words with advanced spellings.  This is part I of this lesson.  Part II will take place next week.  These words have tricky spellings, so please study.  The test will be on Friday as usual.

Math Acceleration:  We will finish our Unit 6 test on Monday.  We will also be taking a pre-assessment of skills that will be taught in Unit 7 which is Statistics and Probability.  Our first lesson on Statistics and Probability will occur on Wednesday.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We will continue what we started in ELA this week.  We are moving along in our anchor text, Maniac Magee.  We will also finish discussing the story from our reading anthology, Hattie's Birthday Box.  We have been working on our annotating skills and will continue with that this week.  During this time, we will also be working on our combined SS/ELA foldable project.

Social Studies:  Our main project in SS now is our Constitution/Westward Movement foldable project.  The students received the guidelines for the project last week.  They should be awesome when they are finished.  They will be presenting their foldable project when completed.  This will be a combined SS/Speaking & Listening grade.

Science:  We're moving along in science as well.  We discussed classification of stars and colors of stars.  We will continue to focus on vocabulary such as red giant, main sequence, supergiant, spectral class, supernova, nebula, white dwarf, neutron star, black hole and planetary nebula.

That's it for this week.  Please email me with questions.

Thank you!

Mrs. Bennick :-)

5B Activities for the Week of April 20th, 2015

Hello Parents and Students,

Here are the reminders for the week:

1.  Soman Chainani, author of The School for Good and Evil and A World Without Princes, will be visiting our school this Tuesday.  We have asked the students to come dressed as fairy tale characters or prince/princesses to honor the author.

2.  We will be having a bike safety assembly on Tuesday as well.  This is a very informative assembly about safety when riding bikes which is so important this time of year!

3.  The 5th grade musical will be this Wednesday, 4/22, in the afternoon and in the evening for parents.

4.  Please return the permission form for our field trip to Hill Middle School which will be on May 4th.  Thank you to all of you who have already returned them!

Here's what's going on in the curricular areas this week: 

Word Study:  This week we will be focusing on words that have silent letters.  The words have been posted to the blog.  Students will be responsible for spelling these words along with identifying their meanings.  The test will be on Friday.

Math Acceleration:  In MA this week we will be finishing up our Geometry unit.  Our last lessons will be on Monday and Tuesday and will be on finding the surface area of both rectangular and triangular prisms.  On Wednesday, we will be creating our own study guides to prepare for the test which will be this Friday, April 24th.  The students should be studying all of their notes and homework sheets that they have been working on these past few weeks.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We will continue studying our anchor text, Maniac Magee.  We will be completing some text-dependent questions and writing in our journals about the characters.  The students will also be introduced to a new project which will combine both ELA and SS.  This project will require the students to do extensive research on a topic pertaining to the US Constitution and then create a foldable about their topic(s).   Guidelines for this project will be coming home this week.  We will also be studying a story from our reading anthology entitled, Hattie's Birthday Box, which was introduced to the students late this week.

Science:  In science, stars will continue to be our focus.  This week, we will be researching star sizes and shapes, colors of stars (classifying) and star birth and death.  Our quiz on the sun vocabulary words will be on Tuesday.

Social Studies (SS)- We will be completing research on the US Constitution project and will also be moving toward the study of the Westward Movement including Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana Purchase.  (This will be ongoing for the next few weeks.)

That is it for now!  Have a great week and please email me with any questions.

Mrs. Bennick :-)

5B Activities for the Week of April 13, 2015

Hello Parents and Students!

There are just a couple of reminders for this week.

1.  If you haven't done so already, please turn in your proof of residency forms.

2.  Jump Rope for Heart will take place this Tuesday during the school day.

Here's what's going on in the curricular areas this week: 

Word Study:  This week we will continue working with words that have the vowel team syllable type.  We will also be learning four new homophones.  The words have been posted to the blog and the test will be this Friday.

Math Acceleration:  We are more than half way through our Geometry unit.  This week we will focus on figures on a coordinate plane, three dimensional figures and nets and surface area of prisms.  The Geometry unit has been going very well!

English Language Arts (ELA):  During ELA we will continue reading and discussing our anchor text, Maniac MaGee and complete some text-dependent questions and journaling questions.  We will also be reading a story from our reading anthology entitled, Hattie's Birthday Box.  We will compare and contrast characters from these stories.  Also, we will be working in a Time For Kids magazine discussing current events.

Science:  We were introduced to the Space/Stars unit this past week and we will be having a short quiz on some vocabulary words that we discussed and illustrated in class on Tuesday of this week.  We also labeled layers of the sun and will continue to study the sun this week.  On Wednesday, we will be creating play dough models of the sun in groups.  We will also be discussing light years and parsecs.

Social Studies:  During the 4th Quarter, we will be working on science and social studies simultaneously.  In SS, we will be participating in inquiry circles to learn about Washington as President of the new country, the electoral college, the President's Cabinet, the origination  of political parties and the White House.

That's it for now.  Please email me with questions!

Have a great week!

Mrs. Bennick :-)

5B Activities for the Week of April 6, 2015

Welcome back!  I hope you all had an enjoyable Spring Break!

We're already heading into the last quarter of school.  Time is flying by!

There are no reminders for this week.

Here's what's going on in the curricular areas this week: 

Word Study:  Again, we are studying the vowel team syllable type.  This week, we will focus on words that have -ou, -ow and -ea in them.  We will be defining the words on Monday and the test will be on Friday.  There will also be homophones this week that we will review in class but the students will not be tested on the homophones, only the vowel team words.

Math Acceleration:  We will continue our study of Geometry this week.  On Monday, we will be finishing up our lesson on finding the area of composite shapes and then we will be problem solving changing dimensions.  We will then begin studying volume.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We finished the book, Red Kayak, just before spring break and since the students loved Red Kayak, I began reading the sequel to it entitled, The Journey Back.  It's Digger's point of view.  We will not have time in class to continue reading this book, so many of the students will want to read it outside of class.  However, our new anchor text for the 4th quarter is entitled, Maniac Magee, which we will begin reading either this week or next.  The students presented their historical event newscasts just before break and they were incredible!  I took videos of some of the kids who wanted to be videoed and I can send them to you via email if you'd like.  Just let me know.  Also, the students will be writing their own historical figure interview questions this week for the second half of our performance task. The 4th quarter theme is moving forward.  This theme ties into our previous one, making choices, and how choices can determine how and when to move forward.

Science:  We will be studying stars/solar system/space/galaxies for the next few weeks.  We will begin with an introduction to space early this week and then move onto studying a very important star, the sun, later in the week.

That's it for now.  Please email me with questions.

Thank you!

Mrs. Bennick :-)